The more you look for research balloons, the more you’ll suggest China is spying on you.
The more you look for research balloons, the more you’ll suggest China is spying on you.
The hard part about playing chicken is knowing when to flinch. We keep the back channels open in hopes of staving off disaster.
UFO. (Sense of, or Worrisome like) Cuban Missile is back. Benign weather balloon. “Object”, just that, says John Kirby. Whatever else definition about “a stuff(s)” has been in the sky at least in the last 3 weeks ago.
Beside “balloon”, the Pentagon project would have military drones operating on the ground, in the air and in the water forming a giant “swarm of swarms” for coordinated attacks, but critics say it may be impossible for humans to manage decisions for the drones. So, actually the drone will be facing a balloon. Not sidewinder missiles which cost US$ 400k. Or some lack, missing link.
Or, Americans, which the fact that 2022 actually set the highest ever trade with China, since Pelosi visited Taiwan on August 2nd, (all Americans) felt Sino-Phobia? The more you look for spy balloons, the more UFOs you’ll find. The more you look for research balloons, the more you’ll suggest China spying on you.
If Americans feel threatened about “weather balloon”, will the American or the Biden administration push Taiwan to join NATO as “only solution” to defeat balloon, like the Ukraine - Russia saga? Don't forget last month Secretary General NATO Jens Stoltenberg visited Taiwan. Taiwan’s Ministry of Defense even had to say yesterday that they were probably just weather balloons, but yes, many balloons, not one.
After White House admitted 3 latest objects they shot down were "benign commercial or research crafts", The Washington Post now confirms China's story about its balloon: it was "diverted on an errant path caused by atypical weather conditions." Are the public now worried about (credibility) an investigation by the Washington Post, currently owned by Jeff Beos, a trillionaire, which, rarely, he admits he feels uncomfortable about China (doesn't like Elon Musk, enjoys Tesla selling more & more EV in China). Are China (should) complaint about MAXAR Satellite (owned by Western side), which currently very popular at least 2 issues: (1) Ukraine - Russia war and (2) abruptly mapping anomaly of too much cemetery-burial about covid in China, and China would be accusing America & NATO “spying China”?
With heated, very very heated between Beijing and DC, please two sides remember: we keep the back channels open in hopes of staving off disaster. Please both from DC and Beijing still keep open line communication, keep clear in his/her head each other, to prevent bigger disaster (war). Because 4 days ago, Secretary of Defense Lloyd James Austin III reached out to his Chinese counterpart via a special crisis line, aiming for a quick general-to-general talk that could explain things and ease tensions. But Austin's effort on Feb. 4 fell flat, when Chinese Defense Minister Wei Fenghe declined to get on the line, the Pentagon says. If level minister refused to talk each other, at last some persons, both from two sides, still (keep) the back channels open.
When the Biden administration officials in early February identified and eventually shot down a surveillance balloon attributed to China, the prominent acknowledgment of a spy balloon captured public attention and inflamed tensions between Washington and Beijing. But since then, the prospect of the US government intercepting unidentified flying objects has become quotidian, with three UFOs shot down in the past four days—two near Alaska and one over Lake Huron near Michigan. The spree raises the question, are there more UFOs over US airspace than usual, or is everyone just looking more closely?
Researchers say it's the latter, and they note that even before the balloon mania began, the US government tracked many UFOs in its airspace, including a number of balloons. The US Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) released a January report, for example, tracking incidents involving UFOs, which the US government calls Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena or UAPs. Between March 5, 2021, and August 30, 2022, the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office had 247 reports of UAPs. In a wider pool of 366 UAP reports that also includes newly discovered incidents that occurred before 2021, ODNI said that 163 were balloons “or balloon-like entities,” 26 were “Unmanned Aircraft Systems,” or drones, and six were “attributed to clutter.” So, not all UFOs are balloons, and not all unidentified balloons are spy balloons.
Additionally, CNN reported on Friday that in the past year, the US intelligence community invented a novel technique for conducting real-time tracking of spy balloons or other balloon vehicles of interest. After an incident in which a Chinese spy balloon briefly entered US airspace in 2021, US intelligence forces used data they'd collected about the balloon to look back at radar and other aerial surveillance data to search for previously unidentified past incidents. The results then allowed officials to create models for tracking balloon flights around the world in close to real time.
The heightened alert in recent days may have also led to other tweaks to US radar noise reduction methods to detect more small aircraft at altitudes where planes don't usually fly.
“This isn't new; we just hadn't been detecting them in the past,” says Brynn Tannehill, a RAND Corporation senior technical analyst and a former naval aviator. “I suspect that filters on US systems had previously been ignoring things that were too slow, high, or small to be considered threats. Now that the parameters on the filters have been adjusted, we're seeing more of what was already there for the past few years.”
US government officials said at the beginning of the month that the Chinese spy balloon was roughly the size of three buses. Meanwhile, US Defense Department officials said the UFO the US shot down on Friday was likely not a balloon and was roughly the size of a small car. The object shot down on Saturday, on orders from Canada's prime minister, Justin Trudeau, was described by Canadian officials as cylindrical and seemingly smaller than a surveillance balloon. US officials said the UFO shot down on Sunday was octagonal and didn't seem to be carrying anything. Canadian seems (radically) change the perception about China to be low(est) after emerged the video in Bali (G20 Summit), heated exchange between Trudeau and Xi Jinping.
The White House says that China has been working on a balloon surveillance initiative in recent years “that it has used to violate the sovereignty of the US and over 40 countries across five continents,” according to a statement by National Security Council spokesperson Adrienne Watson. On Sunday, the Chinese government claimed that the US illegally flew over 10 balloons in its airspace in the past year. The Biden administration denied the allegation. “Any claim that the US government operates surveillance balloons over the PRC is false,” Watson said in the statement.
“With the balloon at the beginning of February, the US caught China with its hands in the proverbial cookie jar and made the decision to make it public,” says Jake Williams, a former National Security Administration hacker and an analyst at the Institute for Applied Network Security. “There is likely a ton of statecraft happening in the background, either as a result of the decision to publicly acknowledge the first balloon or that led to the decision itself. Generally, yes, things change once a surveillance target knows they're being surveilled.”
The Biden administration has been criticized by some Republican lawmakers and others for being slow to shoot down the Chinese spy balloon and hesitant to reveal specific details about the three other UFOs taken out in recent days. (US officials said shooting down the balloon over land would pose an unacceptable risk due to falling debris.) RAND's Tannehill says, though, that from an investigative perspective, it's difficult to process so many cases simultaneously.
“The White House is caught between rapid response and getting the facts right,” Tannehill says. “Until the path analysis is done, we're guessing who launched them. Getting the facts wrong publicly would be highly damaging to US credibility.” She adds that the UFO disabled on Saturday that also flew over Canadian airspace “brings another NATO country into the discussion, and it becomes a NATO problem, not just US or NORAD,” the North American Aerospace Defense Command.
It ever made any sense that China would send a "spy balloon" over the continental US on the eve of a high-level US-China meeting in China, thereby choosing to disrupt its own meeting (*plan meeting between FM Blinken with President Xi Jinping and his counterpart FM Qin Gang). It'd be downright hilarious if it wasn't so sad to re-read the stories of the last few days with what we now know.
Dissect the “spy balloon” story - both how it is portrayed in the US and China’s response. As you'll see, the more you think about it, the more stunned you get at the sheer absurdity of the whole thing. Again, the more you look for research balloons, the more you’ll suggest China is spying on you.
A hyperbolic - fabricated to frame Chinese is bad. China sent a “spy balloon” over highly strategic US sites. It chose to spy on these sites with a big visible balloon (reported as being “as big as multiple school buses”), that anyone can see with the naked eye from the ground, to “demonstrate it had the capability”, despite having a plethora of other more discreet ways to spy like satellites or stealth drones.
Unclear that anyone doubted China had mastered the technology of *check notes* hot air balloons and why it therefore needed to demonstrate this capability China chose to do so on the eve of Secretary of States Blinken’s visit to China, where he was invited, and hours after signaling Blinken would also be meeting with Xi during his visit, a high-level meeting not granted to any US Secretary of States in years. Don't forget Biden himself mentioned, after a handshake and meeting with Xi Jinping in Bali (G20 Summit), Biden says that Blinken will follow up directly, visit Beijing, to make sure “candid and good gesture” between U.S. and China (after Biden - Xi Jinping meeting).
The important context here is of course Blinken’s visit to China, which could - one can always dream - have been a step towards some form of de-escalation in China-US rapports. Now with at least Washington Post itself publish (IT JUST) benign weather balloon "diverted on an errant path caused by atypical weather conditions.”, a too small chance to resolve relations between two superpowers after bombastic news “Spying balloon.”
It was quite easily foreseeable that a story like this one on the eve of the trip would have made it politically very difficult for Blinken to go.
So a plausible hypothesis is that this whole episode is an attempt by internal US forces to prevent any US-China détente.scenario there is in fact malice on the media’s part and that of politicians and wider members of the blob but it’s “organic malice”, so to speak, jumping at a golden opportunity to scare-warmonger. However you see it, this story is absolutely shameful and a sad reflection of the insane times we live in, when rather than take the time to carefully consider facts, apply reason and common sense, we instead choose as a society to incite fear and hostility. The hard part about playing chicken is knowing when to flinch. What we’re doing is suggesting what we believe is the most effective way to prevent the war (China v U.S.) with the least cost.